Revisiting Greenlight

Ashton Raze: Mainly I'd like the selection process to be a little clearer. Discoverability needs to be better, and certain genres need to be served better. Some types of games sell much better as impulse buys or in Steam sales, for example, and I'm not convinced Greenlight accommodates fully for different markets-within-the-market. Plus Derrick the Deathfin needs to get Greenlit post haste.

Antonio Iglesias: Greenlight has got to the point that visibility is a big problem. I think that is one of the main issues to take care about, but there are other important problems -- for example Steam users have very few motivations to vote for games. If they succeeded in making more people vote everyday, it would be a massive improvement to get things move faster.

Colin Walsh: I think that supplementing Greenlight with some extra oversight to prevent "hidden gems" from falling through the cracks would be a good addition, as it feels like there are quite a few deserving games that end up languishing on Greenlight for far too long. Really anything to help reduce the overall time any particular game has to spend on Greenlight the better, assuming a game is a good fit to be sold on the storefront.

Also, if they do end up allowing anyone to sign up and use the Steam back-end to sell their games, maybe they could tie sales data there into the metrics they use to determine what games get added to the Steam storefront.

Richard and Alice

Developers who have recently been Greenlighted

Kyle Pittman: I don't like how Greenlight puts developers in direct competition with each other. I feel like the process actually discourages me from wanting to retweet promotional stuff for friends' and peers' games, which is pretty crappy.

It's difficult to say whether more automation and peer review would improve Greenlight. The community is already good about snuffing out joke games, troll games, and the like. It feels to me like the biggest problem Greenlight needs to solve right now is how to deal with games that have mild interest but not enough to crack the top 100, or games which have stagnated somewhere in the top 100 but below the threshold for selection.

I don't know whether there's a deliberate reason for only selecting a certain number of games in each batch (time cost of human involvement, attempt to avoid oversaturation, etc.), but it feels to me like a wholly peer-reviewed system could be better.

That is to say, if the community agrees that your game is a legitimate, finished product and not a joke or a work in progress, then it goes straight to Steam. I can imagine that system would have its own pitfalls (namely oversaturation and exploitability), but it could be a win for the smaller niche titles that aren't able to attract enough buzz to reach the top of the list."

Brad Carney: To some extent, I think you need a panel of smart people looking over candidates to figure out which games have the potential to do well on Steam, and which may have artificially high vote counts which may not translate to good sales.

Kevin Cerda: One of the first things that come to my mind is to check if the games are already finished or not. In our case, two weeks before our PC release, a lot of games were greenlit, and some of them where in a lower position than Nihilumbra. Amongst them there were a lot of alphas that won't be released until one year at least. When the day came, we had to release our game in a lot of digital stores, promising everybody that we would send Steam keys as soon as we got there. We got greenlit in the next round.

That was really bad for us. A situation like this can really affect to a game's release and it could be easily avoided if, in similar circumstances, finished games had more priority above the ones that are not ready to be playable at all.

Pietro Righi Riva: It would be interesting if users had ways to be more influential on Greenlight. I think Steam users should get more "Greenlight Influence," for example, if they end up buying the games that they helped greenlit. I think maybe players should also be encouraged to vote for Greenlight games more often through coupons and achievements. Valve has done a great job at gamifying its marketplace and I think it's weird that they haven't gone the same route for Greenlight yet.

Giorgio Ciapponi: My greatest concern with Greenlight is the lack of strong correlation between Greenlight audience success and a game's quality. Greenlight measures a game's personality, idea, and marketability to Greenlight's own audience, but says little of how it plays, how much polish there is to it, and how well it will do once in the store, which will reach a much wider and diverse audience. There are a few examples of people voting a game on Greenlight and purchasing it once available, only to be surprised at the game being of a different genre than they expected, or just being sorely disappointing in every aspect.

Davioware: They could add sorting based on genre (a la Netflix). Right now you have to search in the search bar to find specific genres. If it were Netflix style, people would be exposed to more diversity.